Cori joins Chris Jolly on Freight Coach, Episode 1543, to talk heavy haul, oversized freight, and doing the right thing.

Cori Eckley-Ritchards, now NATCO Transport’s VP, had originally planned to leave the family business. She was finishing grad school, working for her dad in the meantime, and looking for a job elsewhere. Then her father died unexpectedly, and she stayed to help her mom, who owned an asset-based truck line.

“Fast forward 23 years, I’m still here,” she told host Chris Jolly on his recent Freight Coach podcast. “So, I didn’t go very far.” She calls that detour “a blessing in disguise.”

“If It Fits in a Box, I Don’t Know What to Do With It”
Cori is fourth-generation transportation, raised on the flatbed and heavy haul mentality. It shows. “There’s a running joke in my office,” she says. “If it fits in a box or it fits in a dry van, I don’t know what to do with it.”

Hand her something wide, tall, or strange, though, and she lights up. “If you give me something 14-foot wide, obscure, tall, all the constraints and challenges, I’m on it. I love it.”

Shippers Are Asking Harder Questions
Cori and Chris spend much of the conversation on the pressure facing brokers, from court cases like Montgomery (see how we covered it in The Middle of the Road Just Got Narrower) to fly-by-night operators who make honest ones look bad. Both are TIA members, and they talk about why that logo matters to shippers.

Customers have noticed the risk, and they are vetting. “In my 23 years, I’ve never been asked that question until recently,” Cori says. Trucking has become dinnertime conversation.

She sees an opening for smaller, more hands-on shops. Shippers may stop choosing a broker because it has “2,000 people working for them,” and Cori hopes they do. “I hope that mentality goes out the door.”

How NATCO Answers
Her answer starts with technology, then leans on repeat carriers and drivers who know the work. “We’re familiar with them, so we’re not questioning what kind of service we’re going to get.” Some carriers call before NATCO has posted the details: “Hey, do you have any information yet? Where do I need to be?”

Transparency is the other half. “See something, hear something, say something is our rule of thumb.” You can see how that plays out on our trucking network page.

The Truth Beats the Fast Truck
Cori would rather deliver an honest update than a hopeful one. “I would rather tell a customer that we’re still working on an order that’s complicated, oversized, whatever the constraints are, versus saying I have a truck and be crossing my fingers.”

She sells the way she likes to be sold, aiming for “more of a consultant type relationship versus quickest, fastest truck, cheapest truck.”

One story sums it up. Years into her business, Cori spotted a customer’s name on a stranger’s shirt at dinner. She introduced herself as a vendor, and the man looked at her and said, “Oh my gosh, you’re Natco.” Her name and her company’s had become one and the same.

Watch the Full Conversation
Catch the entire Freight Coach episode:

• On Apple Podcasts
• On Spotify

The post Fourth-Generation Freight, and a Broker Who Won’t Cross Her Fingers appeared first on NATCO Transport.

One needle, one number, no history. This is what “checking your data” used to mean.

Ask five people in trucking what “telematics” means and you might get five different answers.

At its simplest, a telematics device is just hardware on a truck (GPS, an ELD, sometimes a camera) that captures data and sends it to a platform. No mystery, no black box. Just a truck reporting on itself in real time.

What fleets do with that data is where things get interesting. A new report from the American Transportation Research Institute, From Data to Decisions: Trucking’s Use of Telematics Data to Improve Performance, surveyed more than 100 motor carriers and turned up something worth flagging for anyone shipping flatbed or oversize freight:

Safety metrics like speeding and critical events are tracked by more than 90 percent of fleets, but the metrics tied directly to cost — things like preventative maintenance scheduling and cost per mile — lag well behind. Nearly half of carriers still don’t connect their telematics data to maintenance software at all, even though ATRI ranks those exact metrics among the industry’s highest-value, most underused opportunities.

That gap is exactly where a 3PL earns its keep. NATCO doesn’t own the trucks producing this data, but we live inside it every day. When we vet a carrier for an oversize or heavy haul load, we’re weighing the same signals this report highlights: safety history, equipment reliability, on-time performance.

That’s how we match freight to carriers who can actually deliver it intact and on schedule, not just whichever truck is available first.

Telematics turns a truck into a source of decisions, not just a location on a map. Our job is knowing which of those decisions actually move your freight forward.

Read the full ATRI report at TruckingResearch.org, and see the scope of our vetted carriers moving your freight on NATCO’s trucking network.

The post Telematics, Decoded appeared first on NATCO Transport.

Every shelf in this aisle got stocked by a truck. Some of them more than once a week.

Open the refrigerator. Almost every item inside — the milk, the produce, the packaged goods — made its way to the store on a truck. Before that, the ingredients that became those products also moved by truck, often several times over, from farm to processor to distributor to shelf. Take trucking out of the picture and the shelves empty out within days. That’s not an exaggeration. It’s how tightly the food supply chain depends on trucking.

An industry that measures itself in billions of tons
The scale is hard to overstate. In 2024, commercial trucks generated an estimated $906 billion in gross freight revenue and hauled 11.27 billion tons of freight, roughly 72.7% of everything shipped domestically by weight, according to the American Trucking Associations. Nearly 15 million trucks are registered to do that work, and the fleet logs almost 330 billion miles a year getting it done.

Trucking doesn’t stop at the border, either. It carried 67% of the value of U.S.-Canada surface trade and 85% of U.S.-Mexico trade in 2024, tying North American supply chains together, one load at a time.

Millions of jobs, most of them at small companies
The freight itself is only part of the story. Trucking employs 8.4 million people across the economy, including 3.58 million drivers, and that’s before counting the mechanics, dispatchers, warehouse staff, and freight brokers whose jobs exist because trucks need to move. The Bureau of Transportation Statistics tracks these employment trends across the broader transportation and warehousing sector, and trucking consistently accounts for a large share of it.

Contrary to the image of a handful of national mega-carriers, most of this employment sits with small operators. Almost 580,000 motor carriers are registered with the FMCSA, and 91.5% of them run 10 trucks or fewer. Trucking is, in large part, a small business industry, one where a single owner-operator’s paycheck depends on the same load-by-load economics as a major carrier’s.

As Drivewyze’s introductory guide to the industry describes it, that’s also how carriers get classified in the first place: by whether they haul their own goods or someone else’s, by the size of the load, and by the type of truck involved. Truckload, less-than-truckload, private fleet, for-hire: the distinctions sound technical, but they describe real differences in how a shipment gets from a farm or factory to a store shelf.

Essential, and exposed
None of this happens in a vacuum. As Investopedia puts it, the transportation sector is “central to the economy,” though its stability rises and falls with fuel prices, labor costs, regulatory shifts, and events far outside any one company’s control. A spike in diesel prices, a driver shortage, or a new emissions rule can ripple through freight rates and, eventually, through the price of groceries.

Drivers feel that exposure directly. Turnover at large fleets topped 50% in 2022, insurance premiums have climbed sharply, and carriers are under real pressure to invest in safety and efficiency just to stay competitive. The industry that keeps the country fed and stocked runs on thin margins and a workforce that’s harder to hold onto every year.

Why it matters at the kitchen table
Strip away the tonnage figures and freight bills, and the point is simple. Someone drove a truck so the bread, the produce, the medicine, and the everyday goods a household depends on would be there when needed. Trucking isn’t background infrastructure, it’s the reason “putting food on the table” is still possible at the scale a modern economy requires. Understanding the industry, its size, its fragility, and the people who keep it running, is a start toward appreciating just how much rides on every load.

The post Somewhere on the Road, a Truck is Bringing You Dinner appeared first on NATCO Transport.

The Transport Intermediaries Association (TIA) Policy Forum is important to me as a transportation brokerage owner for several reasons. The event gives me a platform to work alongside other like-minded business owners, an opportunity to meet and educate lawmakers about issues directly affecting my business, and a way to build awareness for how our industry actually operates.

TIA Policy Forum: Advocacy and Perspective

Over the years, while attending the TIA Annual Conference, I heard about the Policy Forum from other members. I knew it was focused on advocating for the transportation brokerage industry, but I was unsure how I’d be able to contribute to this type of event.

The term “Policy Forum” was intimidating to me, since it involved government and elected officials. Several of my mentors encouraged me to attend, as it was a chance to educate members of congress about the 3PL industry. My first Policy Forum in 2016 was an eye-opening experience as a business owner. Approximately 40 people attended that year. The TIA staff and seasoned members were extremely helpful while I learned to navigate the event. The Government Affairs staff scheduled 60+ appointments with congressional offices. Everything was well organized, and we were given key speaking points ahead of time. Information packets compiled by the Government Affairs team helped us walk in prepared. This gave me the confidence to speak with lawmakers and their staff about the needs of our industry.

I’ve continued attending the Policy Forum for the past 10 years now. It’s one of my favorite industry events each year. With help from TIA staff and prior attendees, the group keeps growing. Last year we had one of our largest turnouts yet. My business is based in Arlington, Texas, and I’m a proud member of “Team Texas.” Many owners and executives travel in from Texas each year, so we always have a strong contingent representing TIA. We spend time comparing notes on our businesses, working through how government regulations shape our day-to-day operations.

I look forward to working with other Texas members because this event gives us a real chance to network. I consider everyone I’ve met and worked with at Policy Forum both mentors and friends. We know each other on a professional level, but a personal one too. A key takeaway from my experience with TIA events: people are genuinely helpful and willing to assist. The one-on-one conversations I’ve had with other members have helped me over the years in ways I didn’t expect.

Advocating for your business and the industry as a whole matters. Given the constantly shifting regulatory landscape, business owners carry a high level of risk and liability. The Policy Forum is an active way to advocate on your own behalf. When we meet with congressional offices, they already know the TIA name, credit to the ongoing work of the Government Affairs team. In several of my meetings last year, the representative or staff member knew the Government Affairs contact by name. Participating in the Forum lets us reiterate the challenges our industry faces, with real-life examples and data behind them. We leave an information packet with each office, laying out the size and scope of the workforce within the transportation brokerage industry. TIA also encourages members to host a Policy Forum style meeting at their own business, inviting their local representative to see operations firsthand. Advocacy isn’t a once-a-year exercise, it’s an ongoing effort.

The Policy Forum is a rewarding, impactful event, and I encourage every TIA member to take part. I highly recommend attending this year to represent your business. Now more than ever, we need to work together to raise awareness for this industry.

The post Why the TIA Policy Forum Matters appeared first on NATCO Transport.

The old tire got stuck. Yours doesn’t have to.

ATRI’s Analysis of the Operational Costs of Trucking breaks equipment spending into four buckets: trucks, trailers, repair and maintenance, and tires.

Of the four, tires are the smallest line item on a per-mile basis, but they’re also the one that fleets have the most day-to-day control over, and the one where the newest technology is making the biggest difference.

According to ATRI, the industry’s average tire costs rose 6.4 percent in 2025, to $0.050 per mile, after two years of near-flat pricing. Tariffs on natural rubber from Southeast Asia and on the petroleum feeding synthetic rubber production both pushed costs up.

Specialized fleets, the category that includes flatbed, felt it more than most: mid-sized specialized fleets running five to 100 trucks saw some of the highest tire costs in the industry, largely a function of harsher duty cycles and heavier loads.

With per-tire costs climbing, the industry’s response has been to focus less on price and more on how long a tire lasts. Manufacturers are leaning on advances in tread design, compounding, and casing durability to stretch tire life and hold performance over longer service periods. A few specific shifts stand out:

Smarter compounds. Tire makers are turning to silica-enriched rubbers, bio-based polymers, and chemically recycled PET fiber cords to build tires suited to high-load and long-haul duty. The goal is a casing that holds up to heat and load without sacrificing rolling resistance.

Built-in sensors. Integrated sensors now feed real-time data on wear, pressure, and overall tire condition back to fleet managers, letting crews catch a slow leak or uneven wear pattern before it turns into a roadside breakdown. Some manufacturers are going further, embedding radio tags that stream tire data to the cloud for lifecycle tracking.

Retreadability by design. Newer casing technology is engineered from the start for durability and multiple retread cycles, which matters more than ever as fleets stretch trade cycles and hold onto trucks longer.

None of this changes the tariff pressure driving prices up in the near term, but it does change the math on total cost of ownership. A tire that lasts longer or retreads better closes some of that gap. Full tire and equipment cost data is available at truckingresearch.org.

The post Tires: The Small Line Item Doing the Most Work appeared first on NATCO Transport.

Fuel costs start at the source, long before diesel ever reaches the pump.

Every year, the American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) publishes one of trucking’s most closely watched benchmarks: the Analysis of the Operational Costs of Trucking. The 2026 update, covering 2025 data, tracks costs across driver pay, equipment, insurance, and fuel, giving carriers and shippers a clear picture of what it actually costs to move freight.

For once, fuel gave the industry a break. Diesel prices swung by just 41 cents between their highest and lowest points in 2025, the calmest year since before the pandemic. That stability held the industry’s average fuel cost to $0.482 per mile, barely a tenth of a cent higher than 2024.

Scale mattered. In the truckload sector, fleets running more than 1,000 trucks spent 8.8 cents less per mile on fuel than fleets with fewer than 5 trucks, a gap ATRI attributes to both economies of scale and newer, more efficient equipment. Specialized carriers, the category that includes flatbed and oversize freight, generally paid more at the pump than truckload fleets of comparable size, though that gap narrowed in 2025.

Fuel economy also nudged upward, averaging 7.43 miles per gallon industry-wide, up slightly from 7.41 in 2024. Weight matters more than almost anything else here: trucks running between 60,000 and 70,000 pounds hit the sweet spot at 7.56 MPG, while loads above 70,000 pounds saw efficiency drop off, a detail worth knowing for anyone specing out heavy or oversize hauls.

None of these numbers exist in a vacuum. ATRI corroborates its fuel data against EIA figures and builds it into a report that also tracks driver pay, equipment costs, insurance, and more, freely available at truckingresearch.org.

And as we all know too well, prices change, sometimes dramatically. We’ll need to wait another year for ATRI’s next report, but we can already see, and with confidence, that those fuel prices spiked in 2026.

At NATCO, we read these reports closely because line-haul economics change how we route, spec, and price freight. Whether it’s a flatbed load headed cross-country or an oversize haul that needs special permitting, we’re always looking for the most economical way to get yourr freight from Point A to Point B.

The post The Calm Before the Spike appeared first on NATCO Transport.

On May 14, the United States Supreme Court ruled, nine to nothing, that federal law does not shield freight brokers from state lawsuits claiming they negligently hired an unsafe motor carrier.

The case is Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, and it ends a decades-long argument over where a broker’s responsibility begins and ends. The answer, for now: somewhere in the middle. Which is exactly where a brokerage lives.

Consider the position. A 3PL doesn’t hire drivers. It doesn’t train them, maintain the trucks, or hold the CDL or maintenance records. Those obligations belong to the carrier. Yet, the Court has confirmed that a broker can be held answerable, under the tort laws of 50 different states, for the safety of the carrier it selects.

And here’s the rub. Dig too deep into a carrier’s record, or direct a driver too closely, and a court may decide the relationship looks less like a contract and more like employment, with an entirely different set of liabilities attached. Know too little and you’re negligent. Know too much and you’re the employer. The window between those two outcomes is narrow, and it just became the most consequential real estate in transportation.

Across the industry, the diligent response is taking shape: documented vetting processes, automated screening parameters that stop a carrier failing multiple federal safety categories before setup ever completes, authority – history requirements measured in months and years rather than weeks. And, optimally, there is verification at every step in the process, from load to off-load. Recycled MC numbers and double-brokered loads are real, and the people running those schemes study the industry’s timing rules closely.

Industry groups are pressing for a federal safety-hiring standard. Plaintiffs’ attorneys read the ruling differently. That debate belongs to the courts and the trade associations. The brokerage’s job is the pivot point, the place where a shipper’s freight meets a carrier’s truck. Diligence there has always been good practice. As of May 14, it’s also the law’s expectation.

The post The Middle of the Road Just Got Narrower appeared first on NATCO Transport.

Gauging the future of vehicle fuel

We’ve been tracking hydrogen fuel cell technology in commercial trucking since 2017. Back then, the promise was enormous and the timeline was uncertain. Nearly a decade later, a cleaner picture has emerged. It’s not the revolution some predicted. It’s something more durable: slow, serious, structural progress.

Nikola Corporation, the startup that once dominated hydrogen trucking headlines, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in early 2025. It’s a cautionary story about startup capital and timelines, and it’s worth noting. But it’s not the story of hydrogen trucking.

The manufacturers doing the real work are the established heavyweights. Toyota has moved its Class 8 hydrogen fuel cell trucks out of the pilot phase and into production-level fleet operation, running routes from the Port of Long Beach to its North America Parts Center in Ontario, California. Hyundai’s XCIENT Fuel Cell truck, the world’s first mass-produced hydrogen-powered heavy-duty truck, has now been deployed in 13 countries and has accumulated over 13 million kilometers since its 2020 launch. Volvo, meanwhile, has begun on-road testing of hydrogen combustion engine trucks, with a commercial launch planned before 2030.

The performance case for long-haul applications is becoming harder to argue against. Hydrogen trucks typically achieve ranges exceeding 300 miles per fill, with refueling times of roughly 10 to 15 minutes, far more practical than the hours required to recharge battery-electric vehicles on long-distance routes.

The honest challenge remains infrastructure. As of early 2025, just seven hydrogen refueling stations in North America were equipped to service Class 3 through Class 8 vehicles, with only three of those capable of handling Class 7 and Class 8 trucks. That number is growing, but primarily through private, fleet-dedicated stations built around specific deployments. Hyundai’s HTWO Energy Savannah facility opened in late 2025 to support its XCIENT fleet at the Georgia Metaplant. Toyota is building dedicated fueling infrastructure at its North American Parts Center in Ontario, California. The public corridor network still needs to catch up, but the private model is proving the concept.

What we’re watching in 2026 is an industry consolidating around players with the engineering depth and capital to see it through. The startups tested the concept. The manufacturers are building the future.

The post Hydrogen Trucks: Where Things Stand appeared first on NATCO Transport.

When the list shrinks, the stakes don’t.

On May 20, FMCSA removed 12 more electronic logging devices from its registered list, citing failure to meet minimum federal technical requirements. Motor carriers using any of the 12 have until July 20, 2026 to switch to a compliant device or face out-of-service citations.

Twelve sounds manageable. But zoom out and the number is 79 devices pulled since January 2025. That’s not a one-off. That’s a pattern.

The Door Was Open on Purpose
Here’s the thing about the ELD registration system: it runs on self-certification. A provider says their device meets FMCSA’s technical specs, submits documentation, and lands on the registered list. There’s no independent lab test, no pre-market third-party audit, no one in a white coat running the device through its paces before it ships to a fleet.

That’s not an oversight so much as a design choice, meant to keep the market open and the process moving. The logic isn’t unreasonable. The result, though, is that FMCSA catches problems after the fact, when carriers are already depending on the device to stay compliant.

Think of it less as a locked gate and more as an honor system with audits.

What Would Help
FMCSA records compiled by FreightWaves showed Day 1 alone produced 1,580 inspections, 2,637 violations, and 496 out-of-service orders, translating to a 31.4% OOS rate against total inspection volume. For comparison, the full 2025 event ended at 18.1% vehicle OOS and 5.9% driver OOS across 56,178 inspections. Final 2026 numbers are expected later this year.

What You Can Do Right Now
If your fleet is running ELDs, it costs nothing to spend five minutes cross-referencing your devices against FMCSA’s current registered list. Do it before July 20th.

The post 79 ELDs Pulled Since January appeared first on NATCO Transport.

Two Categories Drew Extra Scrutiny
Each year, CVSA names a driver focus and a vehicle focus. This year, the driver focus landed on electronic logging device (ELD) tampering, falsification, and manipulation. The vehicle focus was cargo securement. (For the full announcement, see the Alliance’s underway notice.) Both categories were picked on the strength of 2025 numbers: falsification of records of duty status produced 58,382 violations last year, the second-most-cited driver infraction across all FMCSA inspections, and cargo not properly contained generated more than 18,000 violations on its own.

Day One Already Hinted at the Trend
FMCSA records compiled by FreightWaves showed Day 1 alone produced 1,580 inspections, 2,637 violations, and 496 out-of-service orders, translating to a 31.4% OOS rate against total inspection volume. For comparison, the full 2025 event ended at 18.1% vehicle OOS and 5.9% driver OOS across 56,178 inspections. Final 2026 numbers are expected later this year.

A few takeaways worth noting now, before the formal release:

• Brakes remain the steady leader. Even when CVSA names other focus areas, brake-related issues consistently account for more than 40% of vehicle OOS findings. Inspectors do not stop checking what they always check.
• Cargo securement is not a flatbed-only concern. Loose dunnage, tools, tarps, spare tires, and chains generate citations at roughly the same rate as the freight itself. For shippers moving oversize, heavy haul, or flatbed loads, securement discipline is the difference between a clean inspection and a sidelined truck.
• ELD audit trails carry weight year-round. Inspectors cross-reference duty status against fuel receipts, bills of lading, and toll records. Roadcheck lasts 72 hours. Hours-of-service enforcement does not.

The post Roadcheck 2026 Came for Logs and Loads appeared first on NATCO Transport.